I scrabbled out of the box and fell, and learned that I couldn’t breathe in water. There was almost three feet of it on the floor. I dragged myself up the side of my resting place. On the walls above some of the coffin-boxes, red lights flashed. Warning, alert, something needs attention, system failure. It babbled through my head. Later I knew I’d understood the purpose of the lights, but not then.

I had a sudden clear knowledge, like another instinct, of electrocution and the conductivity of water. I staggered clumsily through the flood (the strangeness of that came to me later: I was born knowing how to walk) to a door (sight of it, and the word springing into my head, door, and the understanding of what it did), which I pounded and pushed on. Finally I found a lever in the wall next to it, which turned.

The door crashed inward on its hinges. It and the water that had leaned on it for — years? — threw me back into the room. One of the mummies floated past me, upward; another followed it. The water had broken the boxes open.

And then, when I had to know it, I knew how to swim. I lurched toward the ceiling of that underwater enamel house, sucked air out of the rapidly diminishing space there, and kicked out against the pressure, toward the door.

I learned eventually that it was the water of Lake Pontchartrain I was struggling against. The place where I came up, under a full moon with mist rising white from the surface into the cooler air of a midsummer night, was Bayou St. John. Three weeks later a hurricane added it all to the New Orleans basin.

“How long ago was that?” Frances asked after a little space of quiet had settled between us.

“Fifteen — almost sixteen years, now.”

She leaned her head back and smiled. “Mmm. If I’m right, you’re eighty or more. If you’re right, you’ve barely reached the Golden Age of Skepticism. Either way, you hardly look it.”

I don’t know what I’d expected from the first person to hear that story, but I found Frances’s response oddly comforting. Just another bizarre, life-threatening adventure. How many of them had she had? I went to pour hot water into the teapot.

There were a few cookies, bought maybe a week ago in the mall market, in a tin on the shelf. They weren’t fresh, but they had refused to go stale, either. I carried the tin, along with the teapot and my other mug, over to the desk and set them on the corner nearest her. She looked at the two mugs and said, “Entertain often?”

“I only have an extra for when I’m too lazy to wash the first one. If you were me, would you have a lot of close friends?”

“In my own fashion, I’m under the same constraints. And you’re right, I don’t. It’s a furtive little life, but it’s all mine.” She chewed carefully. “Better already. Butter and sugar, in sufficient quantity, will cure anything.” She ate and worked on her tea as if that were all she could concentrate on, and maybe it was. I’d done my talking; I was prepared to sit, and watch, and see what happened.